There are some women, proper English women ranging in age from nineteen to sixty-one, who would travel 3,000 miles to see an actor perform in a role they have seen as many as sixty times or more. This even happened in those far-off, mid-Eighties years, before general hysteria in the treatment of pop and media idols set in and became endemic.
We were doing the end of Cyrano at the Barbican when the only four plays left in the repertoire for the last three weeks were the four plays I was in. They used to have knock-down price tickets on sale at eight o’clock in the morning for that night’s performance, and so people stayed all night in their sleeping bags, when it was miserable and snowing outside, to snap up the tickets from the box office first thing in the morning.
On this occasion these single or unattached ladies, who had seen each other at other performances, were sleeping rough, waiting for seats, and formed a group, and during the night one of them wrote an ‘epic’ poem. A big presence in Cyrano are the Gascony Cadets, and she called her poem ‘The Jacobi Cadets’. They all read it and the idea caught on. They sent me a card with two of the lines:
We’ve queued so long without regrets
That we’ve become the Jacobi Cadets.
This group, in whom I seemed to inspire a rather wonderful form of chaste and undemonstrative devotion, numbered a dozen or more, and among them was one American. The first thing I knew about it was coming out of the stage door one night after the performance to be confronted with them, all with ‘I am a Jacobi Cadet’ on their T-shirts. Those that are still alive and well enough still stand outside the stage door, and there are three of them at least who go back as far as 1983. They see everything I do many times, watch all the films, so it must cost them a fortune. I can’t imagine why, but I seem to have some kind of sex appeal for them.
When I did Breaking the Code in New York, ten of them flew to New York; they stayed at the YWCA, and came several times to the show; I hired a stretch limo and took them out to Joe Allen’s for supper. The press got to hear about the ‘Jacobi Cadets’, and put them on a coast-to-coast chat show, so they went on the telly, and they were so thrilled. By now I knew each of them by name, but they have never tried to meet up socially with me, and were a bit shocked at the idea.
‘No, no, not at all,’ they answered almost in unison when asked. ‘We don’t want to push, you know. We feel he’s ours at the stage door. Not any more than that!’
One night one of them was mugged, and the mugger took her money and all her theatre tickets. When I heard this I replaced them, so it was love from then on; it really became devotion of the highest quality. Over the years I have owed them so much and here profess my thanks and devotion.
There is to this day in America, or so I’m told, a female fan club and website dedicated to me. When I heard about it, I was surprised as I never exactly fitted the mould of romantic hero. I was told these women call themselves ‘The Oestrogen Club’, which does not sound very romantic. The rule for members is that when my name is mentioned they must know six good responses to comments such as ‘Who?’ and ‘Isn’t he a bit old?’
The adoration of fans has a dark side. There were two women in America who seriously wanted to have a child by me, who wanted to have my genes while having nothing to do with me. And for a time there was another woman who stalked me: she found out where I lived in Stockwell, and one night when I was playing Hamlet she was there waiting at the door for me to arrive home. She was small and dark, but not attractive at all.
She wanted to come into the house but I managed to prevent this and keep her on the doorstep. ‘I’m not attractive enough for you, am I?’ she kept saying, and I then had to talk my way out of that one. Eventually she went away, but she was threatening.
The other occasion with this particular devotee was much nastier. She found out where my parents lived in Leytonstone, and one Sunday at lunchtime she arrived on their doorstep.
‘There was a knock on the door,’ Dad told me. He went to investigate who it was and found this woman standing there with a parcel. There was a taxi waiting, just beyond the gate, with the engine running. She thrust this parcel at Dad and told him, ‘This is what your son has done to me!’ She then climbed into the taxi and left.
Dad called Mum and explained what had happened, and obviously they decided to open the parcel. It contained a nightdress that had been torn and covered in semen. This was extraordinary – and, needless to say, it put them off their Sunday lunch.
That was her last visit. I had a feeling she was from Manchester, as I received letters from her some time later with that postmark.
‘Why have you broken my teapot?’ said one letter. ‘What have I done to you that you broke my teapot? Are you going to buy me a new one?’
Along with the fans, with fame come the awards.
‘You’ve got to get over to New York!’ Terry Hands was on the phone, and I was on the island of Sark where I was filming Mr Pye. ‘You have this invitation to the Tony Awards, and the RSC will foot the bill.’
I had been doing Much Ado and Cyrano in New York before Mr Pye came along, and I had been nominated for a Tony award.
‘You’ve got to go, you’ve got to go!’ the RSC and Terry said.
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m in Sark, I’m working.’
‘Well, you just go for twenty-four hours, you’ve got to be there, you’ve got to be there!’
Sark was beautiful, the flowers were extraordinary everywhere: it was summer, and you know the lines:
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses and with eglantine ...
This was Sark where I went to live for three months while we recorded the three parts of Mervyn Peake’s Mr Pye, which had been dramatised for television. No cars were allowed on the island, but there were tractors, bicycles and carts.
We became friendly with the rulers of Sark, the seigneur, Michael Beaumont and his wife, who had a fief from Elizabeth I, with their own special laws including the banning of all automobiles. Stocks Hotel was where I stayed and had wonderful food. The locals always humorously referred to themselves, the people of Sark, as ‘500 drunks clinging to a rock’. Everyone did drink a great deal, but the landlady who managed the nearest pub to us ran her establishment with a rod of iron. If she liked you, it was fine.
‘Going down the Dixcart’: this meant whenever you went to a particular beach on Sark you had to go down a gulley, known as the Dixcart Valley, and halfway down was an area called ‘The Cucumber Patch’ where the lesbian fraternity lived!
I put this prospect of the most extraordinary journey – to America and back – to the producers, and they agreed: ‘Go with our blessing,’ they said.
I left the hotel in Sark, and a tractor took me and my overnight case down to the harbour, where a boat brought me to Guernsey, where a four-seater plane flew me to Heathrow, where Concorde took me to JFK, where a helicopter flew me to the 34th Street terminal, where a stretch limo drove me to the Plaza Hotel, where there was a strike, and where all the chambermaids, porters and everyone were out, and where there was a picket line. I had to walk through it, and here they were throwing tin cans and bricks at people like me, and it all became rather violent. It was like the Burl Ives song, ‘I know an old lady who swallowed a fly’ – the spider, the fly and so on until ‘And she’s dead of course!’ The final line was my arrival.
I got to my room, and there was no room service, no nothing. A stretch limo collected me and I arrived at the theatre. There I won the Tony, surprisingly for Benedick, not for Cyrano. Next morning everything happened in reverse: stretch limo to 34th Street, helicopter to JFK, Concorde to Heathrow, but here the four-seater plane took me, because of fog, not to Guernsey but diverted me to Jersey, where they said: ‘Well, all we can do is to get you to Sark by boat.’ We started out by boat, but it was too foggy, we couldn’t reach Sark, so we had to turn back, and I had to spend the night in Jersey.
Because they had heard on television that I had won the Tony, during the day the whole population of Sark had congregated on the beach where I was supposed to land. They had written ‘Welcome Mr Pye’ in the sand: but such a welcome had to be aborted as I didn’t arrive.
Next morning a hydrofoil brought me over to Guernsey where the boat brought me back to Sark. They turned out again, a large number of them, and were waiting in the harbour waving little flags, with ‘Mr Pye’ on the flags! I disembarked from the boat and climbed into a pony and trap decorated with flowers, which took me up the slope to the main square and Stocks Hotel.
It was the most incredible journey, and it lasted forty-eight hours! But even more extraordinary was this unexpected fêting of Mr Pye, which I considered to be as much for Mervyn Peake, who had lived on Sark and died tragically young, relatively obscure and unrecognised.
Mr Pye was beautifully cast, with Judy Parfitt as Mr Pye’s foil and ultimate disciple, the marvellous Betty Marsden as the fat lady, and Patricia Hayes (who’d been Edna in Edna the Inebriate Woman) as the hilarious Romanian cook in the boarding house. But sadly the isolation and special circumstances of Sark haven’t stopped the island being taken over by property developers, the Barclay Brothers, who put up a castle on Alderney.
Later came three months for five consecutive years filming Cadfael in Budapest; locations were turning into second homes. I had been in Budapest in 1980 where I made my first starring film role in a very strange film. Called The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, it was based on a series famous in Sweden about a Swedish detective called Martin Beck. They had made a film of it before with Walter Matthau (in which the character was called Jake Martin), but they decided to make another with a younger actor playing the detective, shot in Stockholm and Budapest, and this was in 1980, when Budapest was still under communist rule.
During the making of The Man Who Went Up in Smoke I met an ex-burglar who had become an actor, and he would entertain the cast with tales of his burglaries. Years before I had a gold ring given to me by my dresser, which once belonged to the great John Barrymore, and sadly this was stolen from my Stockwell home. The thieves ripped my curtains down, left a disgusting mess on my bed, and wrecked the place. What especially hurt was the loss of personal effects, such as this ring, which was of enormous sentimental value. The burglars were never caught, but even so I doubt that locking them up would have reformed them. The only punishment to make them realise the devastation of their actions would have been to have them suffer the same sense of violation as one of their victims.
Everyone thought this ex-burglar on the set in Budapest was ‘a lovely fella’, but I couldn’t get on with him because of this aspect of his character, which glorified his crimes and expressed no regret. I didn’t confront him – the usual pattern. Most of the cast was Swedish, but they all spoke perfect English. We stayed in a very famous hotel called the Gellert, which has a fantastic swimming pool and thermal baths underneath in the basement. During the war it was the Gestapo headquarters, so it had quite a history behind it, and not always a pleasant one. Even then in the 1980s the vestibule was full of prostitutes.
I was back in Budapest for Cadfael in the Nineties after the 1989 revolution. For the monk they made me have a tonsure, 2½ inches in diameter: it wasn’t that big, but I did feel a bit mutilated when that razor came out and suddenly I had this bald hole on the top of my head. One of the ideas is that there was nothing between a monk’s thoughts and God – and God could see straight into them. Heaven forbid! Some of the young kids who came along to play monks were given the full magnum tonsure, but we were supplied with toupées for our social life.
I would get back to my hotel and stick my toupée on before going out to eat. One night I did this, and then set out to a local Chinese restaurant. I was dining alone so I took my book along, sat down and ordered my meal. When it came I put my book down to eat and for some reason scratched my head, then realised that my toupée was standing on end, sticking up. It had been very windy that evening and I looked like one of the Jedward twins from The X Factor. Everyone must have noticed, including the waitress taking my order. But not a word was said. Sweating and embarrassed, I relived the last half hour of my life with this thing sticking up on my head. I ripped it off, put it in my pocket and got stuck into my chop suey!
I loved the filming of Cadfael. They built the set early on for the first episode in the Marfilm Studios, about thirty minutes outside Budapest; the set and the costumes looked terribly new and too highly coloured, but as time went by the set weathered.
Years later I was watching on television a new Robin Hood series, and there was our set. I’m not a great horseman, but I did have to ride on horseback, unconvincingly, and not easily in those flowing monk’s habits, but for the most part they gave me a donkey to ride – named Daisy like my mother. It was very sweet and suited my temperament. I didn’t feel drawn into the medieval Catholic world playing Cadfael, but I developed enormous affection for the character who lived in those violent and uncomfortable times. He had got a hinterland, a whole other life, because in a world of contemplation and discipline he’d spent two-thirds of his life out in the big wide world killing people. The way he dealt with violence was pre-forensic science and pre-car chases. To chase someone he had to get on a horse or run. All his detection was done by smell and touch and intuition and knowledge: not only of the world and of the human character, but also of plants, animals and nature. That is how he solved the murders.
Cadfael was a lovely character to play, but the Carlton TV people never really sold the series properly, as they never had much faith in it. I know at one point early on, the second episode I think it was, a directive came from on high that all the monks had to wear boots, not sandals, because they were frightened it was beginning to look too girlie, with our long frocks and open-toed sandals, so they decreed the monks should butch up a bit and wear hob-nailed boots.
This did us a great favour, for there were times when we were working in the Hungarian winter and it grew very cold indeed. After fifteen or so episodes, when there were more to come, they pulled the plug. They transmitted the series in mid-August, the time of year when people were not watching television. A series like that cried out for cold outside, a log fire, all toasty inside. They produced a DVD, and then it was a big success in America, where they advertised it with a huge poster, a cartoon picture of Cadfael, with a typically American message written across the top: ‘Cadfael: serves God – solves crime’. They took it very seriously over there because it made money.